Monday, April 28, 2008

Amnesty Launches 'Waterboarding' Video

This is an Amnesty International film to promote their campaign against so-called 'waterboarding'. What do you think of this kind of shock tactic advert? It's going to be shown in cinemas all round the country and has a 15 certificate.

It is about time somebody kicked up a fuss about this. I fully endorse the campaign by Amnesty International.

The fact that Dick Cheney endorses waterboarding [a dunk in the water] and that many CIA/MI operatives seem to think Jack Bauer is some kind of 'role-model' goes a long way to explaining the shocking abuse from Abu Ghraib and the like. It is just this sort of behaviour which acts as a fertile recruiting tool for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and it is time someone put a stop to it !!!

Starting with Tony Wots Name, followed by Duff Hoon, Condie Straw, and the rest of the NuLabor bunch that got us into this mess, should all be water boarded, before being extra-ordinary renditioned over to the Hague.Sod showing them the video!

My worry is - what about the idiots that will try it on "just 'cos' they can?" - we have enough problems withem now (happy slapping, bullying types, that record their behaviour to go on U-tube).That would then take away the seriousness of an abhorrent practice by a so called civilised western society.josephine

Hmmm - I have seen harder hitting stuff on my nephew's playstation thingy!

Waterboardiing does strike me as a very nasty thing to do. These are the kind of standards of civilised behaviour that we want them pesky A-rabs to start practisin! And if they don't, well we will just have to bomb them into accepting democracy and the rule of law!

If that's a form of torture then what is white water rafting?! Terrorists and those suspected of it deserve much more punishment than being splashed with a bit of water!Why aren't Amnesty international campaigning in Islamic countries with a videoing saying - chopping people's heads off is bad, blowing up planes is not good etc etc. Because they're all too scared - we have to be peaceful and forgiving and muslims are at liberty to do what the hell they like - I don't think so!

Still waiting for Amnesty to complain about the terrorists..how about a nice little home movie showing the body parts of little kids after yet another so called 'it's the only way they can express their anger' attacks... waterboarding is wrong but it is still less fatal than psycho terrorists taking bomb belts into weddings etc. Which is the lesser of the two evils? Amnesty twitter about us being civilised but they forget that the people we are fighting are NOT civilised! Clowns.

[8:08] Islamic terrorists and their legions of supporters who believe that it's their god's will that the whole world be converted to Islam, either at the point of a sword/bomb or by persuasion should be aware that we're not going to give up our civilisation without a fight.

We would prevail because we are smarter and in our religion, there is a tradition of scientific discovery and the seeking of ever more knowledge. Islam believes that Allah has already thought of everything worth knowing, so no need to get involved in thinking too much.

On the other hand, the limp-wristed, traitorous British socialists have no will to fight them. Indeed, they seek to make them allies.

So to those who are all for water boarding you suggest we descend to the level of those whom we fight against? It is torture like that that gives the enemy a propaganda tool against us. To paraphrase Dick Cheney it's a no brainer

Anonymous said: 'I'm curious how one is supposed to otherwise extract time critical information from terrorists?'

Ah the Jack Bauer defence. Never used outside of Hollywood fiction and the writings of Tom Clancy.

Intelligence officers on both sides of the Atlantic have been asked time and time again to give a situation from their careers where access to such information afforded by torture might have been able to avert a tragedy. None of them have been able to do so.

How was it paid for? From donations to Amnesty International (Charity Number 1051681) of course.

A couple of points. Water boarding is Chinese water torture. Is it torture? I think the clue is in the name, though obviously there are those to thick to get it.

Anonymous at 8:08 (Carl Eve) highlights a useful and informative article on water boarding. It has been used on our people as has other forms of torture.

Lets make no mistake here, if you approve of torture, whether it is the exquisitely practiced Chinese kind or some unsophisticated kind you approve of torture, not only of our enemies, but our soldiers, sailors, airmen and indeed anyone else who the enemy can get hold of. Not only that but you give the enemy a valuable piece of propaganda to help their cause.

So if you support our soldiers being tortured, by all means support water boarding. I don't.

How do you get time sensitive information to prevent an attack? Well, that is a toughy. Do you want to prevent this one attack, or reduce the death toll overall? When we had broken enigma we learned many things we did not act on publicly, that inaction cost many lives. The reason we did not act on that intelligence is that if we had without having other means of getting that information then he Nazis may have twigged we had broken enigma which would have cost us more years of war.

Likewise if you torture someone to get information, and that gets out, then that is a recruiting sergeant for the enemy and costs more lives whilst excusing acts of torture on our own people.

Paul Burgin writes, curiously, "So to those who are all for water boarding you suggest we descend to the level of those whom we fight against?"

No. We're suggesting water boarding.

Not flying 747s into skyscrapers and robbing thousands of innocent people of their lives and putting their spouses and children in mourning and wrecking a wide network of lives. Not blowing up nightclubs with hundreds of innocent young people dancing the night away and eliminating their futures and wrecking their parents who loved them.

Not blowing up Madrid Railway station with thousands of commuters pouring through at rush hour. Not blowing up a London Transport underground - how nightmare-ish! dark! - no air! - tube and a populated bus.

Not trying to drive a Jeep, aflame,into Glasgow Airport.

Not planning to blow up 10 transatlantic liners over American and Canadian cities simultaneously to cause panic and havoc.

Waterboarding affords a few seconds of terror and then the waterboardee realises he is safe and alive and can step off the board.

I'm trying to get a line on Paul Burgin's dendrons here.

Paul Burgin, I cannot see the equivalency.

Actually, my own preference is that we do operate on their level - but more.

Is there anyone who can compile a video of the events I have described above - it will be somewhat longer than that little waterboarding incident without the lengthy sinister intro - and arrange to run it in cinemas? And schools?

Apparantly all this fuss is because some 'British citizens' who were detained in Pakistan are alleging MI5 officers questioned them there and used this method. Another bunch of people detained on their way to a wedding? Or did they simply get lost on their way to Whitechapel from Mile End? Hopefully it stopped another Underground atrocity. Real people don't care about this, they care about getting through life without being fleeced by the government, paying through the nose for everything or getting blown up by a bunch of demented home grown towel head inadequates from communities that have been encouraged not to integrate with the rest of society over 40+ years.

verity - so you endorse Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture do you ?? Being threatened with dogs, electrodes, stress positions and sleep deprivation is not, as you preposterously characterise it, being 'made to walk around with panties on your head'.

This is only module 1 of the government's foundation course in"How to torture people you don't like". Module 2, to follow shortly, will involve "How to remove fingernails". The BBC will be running concurrent programmes giving more extensive details and methods accompanied by "Oo isn't it awful but I like it" voiceovers. The qzjlubyBBC editors and producers who usually dedicate themselves to "research" into pornography and child abuse will have the oppportunity to widen their scope.

Amenesty International is an excellent thing. It is against torture everywhere - east, west, north, south. If waterboarding is an effective way of extracting information, then I suspect it is not very nice. It defiles those governments (and their countries) who practise it. If you were inviting disparaging comments about the video, Iain, then shame on you.

A world of fighting men being in a recognisable uniform and fighting to an agreed code is long gone. In that world torture would have been considered bad form and was frowned upon; in modern times we have 'conflicts' not wars and 'incidents' not battles.Under the old rules of warfare you could shoot combatants not in uniform and hold any prisoners until the end of the war, that would have prevented all this soppy hand-wringing about the poor terrorist.

We, the west, do not fly 747s into skyscrapers but we do use "shock and awe" carpet bombing, rocket attack weddings wilfully, proudly post videos of US gunships killing every single person that leaves a mosque after prayers, fire M85 and less sophisticated cluster bombs into Lebanese kindergarten, and strafe (from the German = punish) unarmed Iraqi conscripts in slippers who are retreating down Death Highway aka the Basra Road from Quwait.

There is no moral high ground. It is the same discourse. Might makes right says Bush. Might makes right apes Bin Laden and Israel, and China, and Hamas. Bin Laden as personally taught up to speed by the freedom loving CIA.

Amnesty DO run completely different campaigns in the territories of which others speak.

[8:11] - Thanks. I know Amnesty International poses as a charity. I believe it's a hybrid charity/quango, though, otherwise why would Livingstone's girlfriend be working for it?

Life in quangoland is rather intricate, but I do not believe that Amnesty International does not see any taxpayer pounds worming their way through its bank accounts.

But [8:11], let's pretend you are right and Amnesty International is a charity. Do you have any figures on how much it costs to run a - what? - two minute? - commercial in all the hundreds of cinemas in Britain? Would be that three/four times a day in each cinema? Quite a lot of money for a "charity" to find.

Or, as I asked above, were all the oswners of cinemas, private enterprise, not state-owned, struck, en masse, by a sudden loathing of waterboarding?

I also asked whether it was going to be, like the Gore "Al in Wonderland" fantasy of man-made global warming, and inexplicably shown in every school in Britain. I'm still waiting ...

Call me a cynic but there's something rotten in Denmark and it's not cartoons. I smell an agenda here to progagandise the British, using muscle as well as taxpayer money, against defending themselves. We can call it the Reverse Churchill Effect.

Meanwhile, let us remember that there are people who raced down the tube escalators to catch a train that morning on 7/7, and jumped on board as the doors slid closed and now have to be carried to the toilet by their families because there legs were blown off. Or they have no arms. People who no longer curl up with a good book or an intersting magazine article because they were blinded.

Waterboardees suffer a couple of minutes of panic then are released and get up off the board and walk away.

Also, I find it hard to believe that cinema owners are going to intentionally insult customers who have paid for admission.

The majority of Brits - that is, those who live outside the tiny swanky politically elite enclaves of London - are patriotic. They will, I am guessing, approve of fighting terrorism with whatever weapons are handy. I don't think the metropolitan elite assumption that the Briton will be outraged by this has any traction at all. I have a feeling they'll applaud.

Or they'll be appalled at the implied assumption. Applaud or appalled, I don't think cinema owners are in the business of assaulting the sensibilities and patriotism of their customers. Something about this story does not ring true.

But I will bet you they are going to try to sneak it into schools, so those of you with children at school, be alert.

The people who can see nothing wrong with this film are completely missing the point. The thing is, it's impossible for most people to imagine what sort of subhuman scum would be prepared to carry out torture of this sort or any other kind. Not only that, but what sort of people would be so inhuman as to make, finance or watch a film of it. And how appalling that they believe everyone is as insensitive as they are.Eric

Right, if we are prepared to do this to innocent people, on the suspicion that they might be terrorists, then there's no point fighting and we might as well give up now.

Of course, we've come a long way on terrorism, haven't we? In the 1970s we locked people up for life for bombings they hadn't committed. Now we shoot people in the head for bombings they weren't about to commit.

Personally, I can't see why half of you hate fundamentalist Islamism so much since you seem to share so much; first and foremost the belief that people who disagree with you are expendable.

"Andrew Tyrie, Conservative MP for Chichester and a campaigner against the abuse of the human rights of terrorism suspects, is considering asking a series of questions about the matter in the Commons."

So what does verity think [that is, if she is capable of 'thinking'] about the fact that it isn't just the loony left, as she would categorise them, that care about this ??

"For the first 14 days, he says, he was deprived of sleep, beaten about the head during interrogation, whipped on the thighs and buttocks with a rubber lash, and beaten on the soles of his feet with a wooden stick.

On the sixth or seventh day, he alleges, one of his interrogators took a pair of pliers from a box and removed a fingernail from his left hand. He says that at the end of this process he was given a painkilling injection and his finger was bandaged. He says that on the following day a second nail was removed, and a third the day after that. He says that after each of these torture sessions he was given painkillers and his finger bandaged." [guardian.co.uk]

So does verity still think this is an argument about 'men with panties on their head' ?? Catch yourself on - this is the sort of stuff which is acting as the best advertising for joining the 'insurgents' that they could possibly wish for...

If you want to see where this sort of approach gets you, watch the film 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley' - British soldiers pull off people's fingernails, and Ireland's troubles are only just beginning..

"The drill machine was brought in and plugged in outside the room somewhere. It didn't work at first and the inspector shouted at the guard and said to make it work. I was praying that it wouldn't work, but it started working. The inspector told Sikander to drill a hole in my backside and he told me to face the wall and lift my shirt and I had no choice but to do so. Sikander came and warned me while the machine was running. He touched me.

I realised later it wasn't the drill machine he touched me with because I had no injuries, but at that point I really thought it was a drill. They were doing this to break me. I started saying to them that I would agree with whatever they would want me to.

That's when the inspector told me to sit on the stool and put my glasses back on. They then showed me a photograph of another terrorism suspect. I told them that I knew him, and met him in Luton ..."

What this article illustrates is that even if one doesn't have any moral objection to torture [and the sub-human verity appears not to] then the 'information' gleaned from it is worthlessly inaccurate, and cannot be used in a court of law.

So why bother ?? The 'ticking time bomb' is a red-herring. Even if it might have worked against the IRA [which I very much doubt, as there is no evidence for it], they were careful to try and stay alive until the end of the operation.

If you have people on a martyrdom operation, the rules of engagement are very different, and old ways simply will not be effective.

The IRA were beaten by infiltration and intelligence. I don't doubt that there were some heavy handed tactics, and internment without trial - but they took us further away from the solution, not closer.

Yet with all that experience, it is starting to look like the public at large haven't learnt a damn thing..

Who's going to make the advert of what the aftermath of a (suicide) bombing, or firebombing of a nightclub full women (those "slags"-quote) might look like? I bet you'd find that most people would then see the point of trying to break fanatic Islamists. So what if even 25% of whatever Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to being responsible for is "true"? It gives you an insight into what they would like to do. Better that than the spectacle of the wannabe 20th bomber (Moussaoui) going to his solitary confinement cell spitting and ranting...where's the justice in that?

Here are some facts: On release, almost all the internees at Abu Ghraib were found to have gained weight from stuffing their faces with chilli, burgers with all the trimmings, hot dogs and fried chicken - despite ample exercise facilities.

Fact No 2, most of them, on release, applied for Green Cards.

Second, the prisoners had amply ventilated sleeping quarters with ample ceiling fans. A guard dog outside slept in an air-conditioned kennel (this is not at all uncommon in the American south in summer, especially Texas). A prisoner had the nerve to complain: "Why are we sleeping under fans and that dogs gets air-conditioning?"

And the guard replied laconically, "Because 'that dog' is a member of the United States military'.

I wonder how many of their Green Card applications were successful ...

Jilted John - Frat boys were undergoing waterboarding of their own free will. It is only the self-important Amnesty, which believes its moral indignation entitles it to take over United States foreign policy according to its communist lights, that is shrieking about this technique. Waterboarding is very unpleasant but it does not merit so much excitement among the terrorist-loving lefties. Amnesty is bullying and dictatorial and should be closed down, or else starved of taxpayer funds. I do not believe that there are enough moonbats in the world to donate enough private money to keep this vast boondoggle on the road.

You need to brush up on your reading comprehension because you make yourself look like a fool when you say I "advocate" BNP policies. That's like saying when I ride in a train, I endorse the engine-manufacturer's political allegiances. BNP is a vehicle for thousands - and perhaps tens of thousands - of formerly loyal Conservative voters to deliver a punch in the nose to David Cameron.

However, I am not surprised that someone who gets all shrill and weepy about waterboarding of suspected terrorists cannot understand this very simple strategy.

Again, when they show the waterboarding commercial (and I still want to know who's paying for the time) in cinemas, most people will applaud and cheer.

Oh, did you see in yesterday's paper that that "global warming" is finished? Yup. It stopped yesterday, according to scientists. We haven't heard from Al Gore yet, but it looks as though he may have to wind up his absurd "carbon offset trading" company. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

That's like saying when I ride in a train, I endorse the engine-manufacturer's political allegiances.

No, it is not. Though I applaud you for constructing perhaps your most facile simile ever. Saying that when you vote for a candidate you endorse their policies is a self-evident truth, and the entire point of collective responsibility and elective representation. I heartily recommending an introduction to basic politics, perhaps one pitched at around GCSE level.

Oh, did you see in yesterday's paper that that "global warming" is finished? Yup. It stopped yesterday, according to scientists. We haven't heard from Al Gore yet, but it looks as though he may have to wind up his absurd "carbon offset trading" company. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

again, if you can't see that this cheers me as much as it does you then you really have failed to understand where I come from politically.

Jilted John - "if you can't see that this cheers me as much as it does you then you really have failed to understand where I come from politically."

Incorrect.

I haven't tried to understand where you come from politically. I cannot imagine devoting two minutes thought from trying to understand etc. Your state of mind is not of compelling interest to anyone but yourself.

I'm off this thread. I only wanted to address the ridiculous waterboarding commercial and was hoping someone would let us know where the money to buy time at several performances a day at probably at least a couple of hundred cinemas through the country would be coming from.